Mobile communication technology has made a profound impact on inter-personal communications. Whether for social or business purposes, never before have people had such an expanded ability to interact with each other. While traditional fixed line networks have provided a backbone for remote communications, the advent of mobility has enabled users to employ small, portable devices to effect such communications, while stationary or moving. Accordingly, inter-personal communication can be conducted not just indoors with a device coupled to a fixed power source and communication link, but with a portable handheld device while outdoors, driving in a car, or even flying in an airplane.
Rapid growth of the telecommunications industry has fueled a strong competition for market share in mobile-IP communication devices and communication service plans. Because of such competition, mobile network providers have created packet based data networks that can provide IP access to the Internet and other IP-based network resources and applications (e.g., e-mail, web browsing, and so on). Accordingly, a mobile handset or the like can provide access to a rich assortment of shared computing applications and data resources available via such networks. Further, the low cost, worldwide, personal voice communication traditionally available via mobile communication devices is also available on such mobile handset. In addition, mobile communication networks can generally interconnect with local landline services, providing the mobile handset with as much interconnectivity as traditional wire-based telephony and computing devices but with far greater user mobility and flexibility.
As the mobile communication market increases, the numbers of mobile subscribers increase, and the voice and data demands of such subscribers evolve and become more complex, the support networks provided by legacy voice and next generation data services must evolve as well. Higher speed data must be implemented as web-shared applications become more popular. Such higher speed data requires additional processing power, additional air bandwidth (e.g., between base stations and mobile devices), and additional bandwidth in network interfaces to popular data networks such as the Internet. Further, in certain mobile communication architectures such as code division multiple access (CDMA) and subsequent iterations of CDMA technology, providers look to share transmission resources among low demand but high quality voice traffic, and high demand data traffic, in order to share and maximize current bandwidth resources. Accordingly, network architectures must adapt as numbers of subscribers and demands of such subscribers increase and evolve.